Sunday, October 8, 2017

Smooth Operator

The biggest change I made this week actually took very little time: I made it far easier to move with precision:

I tried to just have the player move via transform.translate whenever it wasn't charging, which did not work at all. From there, I started digging in to the movement code I had written, and I realized that a previous fix that I had attempted had not worked (or had seemed not to work) because of how the movement code interacted with the turning code. I'm never certain if these movement updates will finally make the game feel less frustrating to play, but I hope to get positive feedback on this change.

Other than that, I tested out the effects of having moving objects stop their movement while the player is charging. The result is that certain timing based puzzles are ruined, and even the ones which are improved become kind of boring to solve. Maybe that's the right level of challenge, but that's not how I want to get there. So I undid that change and instead slowed down some of the more problematic timing puzzles. I also implemented something I had been meaning to do for a while: allowing moving objects to pause at each point they move to. It's not used a lot, but where it is used it makes things slightly more player-friendly.

I experimented with placing spotlight over places on the level where it is helpful to stand. It might have worked, except Unity's lighting ignores some lights if they are too close to other lights, and all goals are already spotlit, so that causes a placement problem. I could probably just mark all spotlights as "important" but I feel there must be a better way to get the effect I want.

As always, the "charging up" noise is by Javier Zumer. I use and modify it under this license.